'Who was my real dad?': Brit in search of father finds sisters in Alberta he never knew he had

When Judy Robinson was a pre-teen, she and her sister, Linda, were giddy at the prospect of a younger brother.

They just didn’t know how long it would take.

“We always wanted a brother and were jumping up and down on the bed, saying, ‘I hope it’s a boy,’ ” she recalls.

It wasn’t.

The newest sibling, Pam, would be the third of four sisters raised by Tom and Helen Robinson in Edmonton. It would be decades before they would meet their brother and take two DNA ancestry tests done by strangers in countries far apart to unite the siblings who never knew one another existed.

Back in 1943, long before any of the Robinson girls were born, a newborn named Brian Milnes arrived in the Northern England town of Chorley.

But a family secret related to his roots would take years to be revealed — starting with him being told the man he believed to be his biological father was actually his stepdad.

“It was probably in my late teens when my mother informed me that my dad wasn’t dad,” the 83-year-old recalls. “Mom never talked much about what had happened and she never really passed on a lot of information to anyone.”

For many years, it didn’t matter — life moved along for Milnes without any longing to dig into the past. He married and raised three children.

But as the years went by, Milnes wondered about that incomplete story his mother had hinted at and wanted to know more.

“He met mom at a dance in Preston. We think he might have been on leave from the army or maybe stationed there for a short while,” he says. “She just knew he was a Canadian soldier. She didn’t even know his name, so she told me. That’s why we couldn’t chase anything down. We really didn’t put a lot of thought into it until I was 65 to 70 years old. That’s when it really started to kick home — who was my real dad?”

Several years ago, Milnes’ daughter, Nicola, did a DNA test right about the same time a woman over in Edmonton did one of her own. When the results rolled in, it would unite a family.

“Judy rung up or emailed our Nicola to say, ‘We think Brian is our brother,’ ” Milnes says. “That was a shock. I found out then I had four sisters. I’m quite an emotional bloke. I could have a little weep now thinking about it. It was so out there, you just can’t grasp it.

“The funny part is, nearly all my life from 25 onwards I always said I wanted to work and live in Canada, which we never got to do . . . but there was just some kind of pull.”

Initial suspicions it might all be some sort of scam were cast aside when Milnes saw himself when looking at a photo of his biological father, Tom Robinson.

“If you see Tom and a picture of me when I was a 40- or 50-year-old, you would think we were twins. There was no disputing the fact that he was my father,” he says. “I just fell to bits, in a good way.”

The Canadian connection uniting the strangers was made by Judy Robinson. She wasn’t looking for a lost parent or sibling, but was simply intrigued about her family roots — mostly on her mother’s side.

She knew something might come up on her paternal side, given her father was a handsome, young man when he went over to England and, well, things can happen.

An email from a woman across the pond asking if her dad was a Canadian soldier overseas during the Second World War changed everything.

“I looked up Brian on my end and he was a half-brother match,” 73-year-old Judy says.

She requested her father’s army records. Slogging through “handwritten chicken-scratch and army abbreviations,” she tracked his movements serving with an artillery regiment as a signalman with the Canadian Army’s Italian campaign — his health, where he trained, the day he left on a boat to go over to England. Of course, any romantic liaisons weren’t part of the documents, but the records showed Robinson went on leave on June 22, 1942. And his children later learned that’s when he met a British woman at a dance.

“When you back-track nine months or fast-forward it’s March of 1943,” she says. “Brian was born on March 15th.”

Eighteen years later on the same date, across the pond in Canada, his sister, Shelley — now a Calgarian — was born.

Photographs were sent back and forth and soon plans were in the works for Milnes and his wife, Christine, to come to Alberta to meet Linda, Judy, Pam and Shelley — his sisters he never knew existed.

“It was pretty crazy,” Judy says. “But it all felt really natural and comfortable. The joke now is, Linda is not the oldest, so we don’t have to listen to her anymore.”

Through it all, the sisters also learned more about their father. Known as TJ, he presumably lied about his age to enlist at age 17 in 1939. Of note, perhaps, in there is a reference to his medical records to a doctor asking whether the young soldier used protection, more for sexually transmitted diseases than anything.

Robinson returned to Canada in 1945, not knowing he was leaving behind a woman pregnant with his child.

Soon after, the dark, wavy-haired veteran with a nice smile and grey eyes met his future wife, Helen, at a dance club in Edmonton.

“He had a type,” Judy muses. “My dad was very charismatic and would have swept my mom right off her feet.”

As for Brian’s mother, Judy figures she would have had a hard time being single and pregnant back in 1943, her pregnancy bringing shame, not joy.

“There must have been a stigma,” she muses. ”She was going to give Brian up. They didn’t decide to keep him until he was born. We’re glad she kept him.”

In September, the four sisters went to Workington, a coastal village in Cumbria, England, to visit Brian and meet extended family.

Shelley says she knew the apparent DNA match wasn’t a hoax the minute she saw the face of the stranger living overseas.

“I always thought there’s someone out there from dad’s military days because he was kind of a playboy. But I thought he was going to be Italian,” she says. “As soon as we saw him, we knew.”

She says they all have memories of their father to share with a brother who never met him.

“We all have different stories,” Shelley says. “My dad had a lot of trauma from the war. He had to pick out landmines with pitchforks and saw little Italian kids playing with grenades being blown up. He used to have really bad dreams and would yell in his sleep all the time.”

She remembers good times, too, dancing while standing on his feet at weddings and a family trip to England where her father drove about in an Austin Mini showing them where he had travelled in his younger days.

While some might be pained over all the years the siblings lost, Shelley sees meeting her brother as a blessing.

“It’s amazing it happened. He was looking for his dad but he found his sisters. I’m just happy we completed his circle about where he came from,” she says. “It’s kind of like he was a lost little boy, like there was a big thing missing. He’s a sweetheart and his birthday is the same as mine.”

“We communicate all the time and will definitely be meeting again. It’s only just begun now,” Shelley adds. “I look at it as the glass half-full. Like, we all could have gone to our graves not knowing, you know?”

Three years ago, Milnes visited his father’s gravesite in Edmonton, finding it among all those for fallen soldiers. “It was very moving, honestly,” he says. “I had a few words and said, ’I’m so sorry we didn’t meet, Tom, and that you didn’t know you had a son.’ ”

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